It’s getting more and more difficult to write a proper update for this blog. The visual anthropologist MacDougall hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “Filmmakers sometimes feel themselves emptied, for in reaching out to assimilate the experience of others there is a certain erosion of their sense of themselves. In sharing the worlds of others so intimately, it is possible to lose sight of your own boundaries.” I’ve been so engrossed in the lives of my subjects that I almost feel like an extension of them, sharing their experiences, feeling what they feel—sometimes, I think, as intensely as they do. How can I explain to you how scared I felt when Sumit was called to the principal’s office? How close I was to tears when Sarita couldn’t find a friend to cuddle with at naptime? Every minor trial, every small triumph, is magnified a hundred times watching and rewatching it through the camera lens. It is stranger still that I’m the only one who really knows how intimately engaged I am in their lives—if anything, the students see the camera as an object that distances me from them, preventing me from talking and playing with them. It’s incredible to me that I’ve fallen in love with these kids who two months ago were total strangers. And there’s really no word to better describe it than “love.”
I’ve grown quite close to Sharmila, one of the teachers at the deaf school (who is also deaf herself). I might have spent all my free time these past few weeks curled up in bed with anthropology essays, but Sharmila’s been kicking my butt out of bed at sunrise many mornings to lead me to temples, historical sites, and even shoe shopping! This coming week, we’re visiting the Ohm Temple near Panauti and heading to Bhaktapur for the big cow festival. Last week, we revisited Banepa’s beautiful, gold temple that I first saw with Krishna’s 16 year-old niece (Barsha) a few weeks back. The two trips couldn’t have been any more different! Though Sharmila is only ten years older than Barsha, those ten years represent a very visible generational gap. The teenagers here are far more Westernized than their elders—they wear jeans, eyeliner, and Avril Lavigne t-shirts (“Avril Lavigne is a goddess!” Barsha exclaimed to me once). They have girlfriends and boyfriends, they dig bands like Green Day and Blink 182 (???), and every teen has a thumb practically glued to his cell phone, texting friends. My best guess is that this is due to the impact of the trekkers and tourists continuously passing through Kathmandu, and in turn, Banepa’s proximity to the nation’s capital. (Tourism is the nation’s number one industry, I believe.) I was surprised to find out that Barsha doesn’t even own a sari or kurti. The strong Western influence came as a surprise to me after experiencing the tourist-less Tamil Nadu, and I usually feel pretty dorky coming to school in my ultra-conservative “mom clothes.” [Even those that do wear kurtis have sexed them up a little—tighter pants, short-cropped tops, sometimes sleeveless, and/or more form-fitting top halves to show off their curves. While in Tamil Nadu, it caused public outrage when I forwent my shawl (“But you can’t see anything anyway!”), hardly anyone here has even asked why I don’t wear one.] Though it does vary, most of the women I know in their twenties or older tend to exclusively wear kurtis and saris. I’m curious to know whether this young generation will adopt more traditional attire as they enter adulthood, or if Nepal’s youth are revolutionary, a “Westernized” generation that will cash in the culture of their elders for a more “modern,” liberal way of life.
Now back to our originally scheduled topic: the visits to Banepa’s temple! With Barsha, we hastily scurried around the temple, spending more time talking with a school friend she bumped into than performing any kind of sacred ritual. We peeked briefly into this small inner chamber for my benefit, then she whisked me off to a nearby tea shop so she could talk to me more about her high school dramas. Sharmila, in sharp contrast, arrived decked out with a bag full of rice and candle wicks for the puja (the act of prayer, which most women trek to places of worship to perform in the early mornings). She led me into the smoky inner chamber, which actually turned out to be quite huge, continuing on far beyond the small compartment I’d seen the first time around. My eyes stung from the smoke as she led me around the candlelit cave. Inside, twenty people were crowded around a large, well-dressed rock (which deity it was meant to represent, I don’t know). We elbowed our way to the center of the crowd, where she pushed a rupee and a handful of rice into my palm and showed me how to pay proper respect to the deity. We threw the rice (and the rupee) at the statue and clanged the bells, and a Hindu priest gave us the red for our foreheads. (Though I could show you the signs for all these technical terms, I don’t know the words. Sorry sorry!) We made our way to a whole wall of smaller deity statues, a section of the chamber I hadn’t even seen on the trip before. I lit a candle wick and she took my wrist, guiding my hand in clockwise circles in front of the statues. The smoke of our candles mingled with the smoke hanging thick in the air, and the statues flickered in the flames of the candles lit by women who had come before us. Watching these devout Hindus performing puja by candlelight around me was incredibly moving. Seeing how steadfast these women were in their faith, how unerring they were in these daily rituals, made me realize that something so incredible will be lost if this new generation, does, in fact, abandon the ancient traditions so carefully preserved. It also reminded me once again how senseless it is that people fight wars over “conflicting” religions. Be it God or Allah or the Universe or a hundred different deities, we all worship the same supreme being, different at the heart of it hardly in anything more than a name. People just get so caught up with the details.
In unofficial exchange for all these adventures Sharmila has been taking me on, I’ve added “translator” to my Nepali repertoire of “filmmaker” and “teacher.” For the past week, we’ve been out the door by 6 AM for the quasi-nearby Kavre College, where I translate the English classes for Sharmila. We sit in the back of the room and try not to cause distraction, but I think the college students end up looking at us more than the professor! Sharmila has a huge English vocabulary, and I’ve picked up so much sign langauge from spending time with her. She hopes to eventually earn a B.A., and because the government wouldn’t assist her at a time she needed a translator, she earned the equivalent of an associate’s degree by learning the material independently. This woman is fierce!
Other adventures of the spiritual kind! After much promising and planning, I finally made the trek up a thousand steps to the Buddhist monestary where Zach (the guy I’ll backpack around with two weeks from now) teaches English with two other VIN volunteers, Max and Maartje. I brought my camera but forgot my memory card, which was too bad—it was undoubtedly the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. On top of a huge hill in the outskirts of Kathmandu, the monestary breathtakingly overlooks 270 degrees of the colossal city, which just goes on and on as far as the eye can see. It sits like a lily pad on a pond, all the noise, pollution, and heat of the city swimming just out of reach below the surface. From time to time, muffled sounds from city would float up the hillside, but distorted through the bushes and trees, they almost sounded sweet. The monks were beautiful with big smile lines around their eyes; everywhere I looked felt like I was flipping through a book on a coffee table, but it was real, it was tangible. It was as close to a real world paradise as I’ve ever been. The highlight of the day was when Maartje took me to the afternoon puja, which was nothing at all like the Hindu puja (but in some ways exactly the same… or as they say here, “same same, but different.”) Unlike the solo worship of the women who trek alone to the temple, the Buddhist puja was very much focused on group activity. While we sat meditating and sipping hot buffalo milk, the monks beat two giant drums, chanted as a group, chanted individually, clanked finger cymbals, and blew into the strangest-sounding brass instruments. After two long months working in the deaf school, I was primed to fully appreciate the sonic wonderland. I closed my eyes and let it totally wash over me. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more peaceful; I was amazed and disappointed by how quickly the hour flew by. Max is about to leave for a ten day silent retreat, where he’ll sit in a meditative position for nine hours a day without talking, reading, writing, exercising, or moving, really. I’m not sure I could handle nine straight hours of intense meditation, but I definitely wished the puja had gone on a little longer.
Though I don’t fly out for nearly a month, it already feels like I’m rounding the corner into home stretch… I’m sitting in my hotel’s peaceful garden in Kathmandu right now, preparing for the big translation session with the interpreter that I’ve been anticipating for months; I’m crossing my fingers that this will bear new fruit for my film and help me with subtitling. I have two weeks left as a quasi-resident of Banepa, but with Hindu holiday season in full swing, I have a mere six days of shooting left to go. I’d say the bulk of my film is buried in the 22 hours I’ve shot so far, but I’m still excited to see what surprises might lie in the final days ahead of me. That’s probably the most wonderful—and exhausting!—part of shooting a documentary: you never know what will happen next, and it’s really been keeping me on my toes for the past two months. On August 15, Zach and I will head west, taking in the quiet, supposedly heavenly town of Bandipur, the infamous lakeside tourist alcove of Pokhara, and Gorkha, the hometown of many of Zach’s monks and a city strongly recommended to me by my T.A.
* The title for this entry doesn't really have anything to do with the content at all... just a reflection on how much rain we've gotten this past week. Monsoon season is really kicking into full gear; the other day, I had to wade my way upstream to school--a river that's usually a paved road!
i want to learn how to meditate!
